Startup Pirate Pay To Stop BitTorrent Traffic

Pirating may get a lot harder in the future, as a Microsoft funded Russian startup, called Pirate Pay, aims to kill all BitTorrent traffic and bring the entertainment industry a pirate-free future.

Software developers recently built a system that tracks and shuts down the distribution of copyrighted material on BitTorrent, managing to successfully stop thousands of downloads in their first project.

This first attempt was carried out in partnership with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, as two out of numerous companies who believe that torrents are one of the largest threats to their revenue.

The idea started three years ago with a management solution for Internet providers, a technology that was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed. The startup then realised the existing potential and developed it into a promise of combatting the spread of pirated content.

The principle behind the technology allows owners to attack existing BitTorrent swarms, thus making it impossible for people to share files.

After Microsoft invested approximately £62,000 in this project, Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures were the first to make use of the software, by protecting the movie “Vysotsky. Thank God I’m alive” with moderate success.

The key to Pirate Pay’s success so far remains secret, but as the company’s CEO Andrei Klimenko stated, all torrent clients were sent “specific traffic” to confuse computers about the real IP addresses of others, while disconnecting them from each client.